Issue: When you search a Windows generated log file in the Mac Console app, you may have trouble finding search terms even though you can see them right in front of you.

Additional info: It turns out that there are extra invisible characters between every character, thus [FATAL] becomes ¿[¿F¿A¿T¿A¿L¿]¿. These invisible characters will break the search string matching in your Mac applications.

Solution: A simple solution is to use the Mac TextWrangler application (free) to open the log file. You can even do this while the file is open in Console. In TextWrangler choose Text>ZapGremlins (how’s that for a cool command name?). This will delete all invisible characters. And if you have Console open in the background you’ll notice that your log file is updated automatically. Your searches will now work as expected.

UPDATE: If you find that email messages sent from Outlook for Mac, or Outlook Office365 for Mac are becoming truncated after you copy and paste something (like text from a log file from a Windows machine), it’s the gremlins at work again. Outlook does not handle these invisibles very well at all and cuts off everything in the message after the offending character. I’ve noticed that it is also cut off in the Sent Items folder as well, which means lots of lost work. I’ve found that pasting the log file snippets through Text Wrangler and sanitizing them with “zap gremlins” fixes this issue in Outlook as well. It’s an extra step, but it works and you won’t be sending emails that are chopped off right where you pasted something important.